Since January, 2010, this blog has been dedicated to year-round coverage of the New York theater scene and, particularly, the annual Tony Awards race. The site features commentary on each production and its chances at nominations or wins, with keen insights into voter trends, leading to expert predictions.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

New York Times Profiles Rachel Griffiths

Patrick Healy of the New York Times recently talked with Rachel Griffiths, star of television's Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters (both shows netting her two Emmy nominations each) and of the film Hilary and Jackie (scoring a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her role as Hilary DuPre'). They talked about her experiences growing up in Australia and her upcoming Broadway debut in the transfer of Lincoln Center's Other Desert Cities.

ADULT children who dream of lashing out at their overbearing mothers, detached fathers and deadbeat loved ones have had a hero in Rachel Griffiths for years now.

As Brenda Chenowith, the mercurial love interest of the lead character on the HBO series Six Feet Under, Ms. Griffiths gave a master class in acting out — sexually, emotionally, cripplingly — and never seemed happier or sadder than when she was ridiculing her narcissistic mother, Margaret. (Brenda to Margaret, parked near a spa: “Can’t we at least go inside? I could get a seaweed wrap while I pretend to listen to you.”) Soon after Six Feet Under ended its five-season run, Ms. Griffiths buttoned up to become the businesswoman Sarah on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters, but she still told off her buttinsky relatives now and then.

Ms. Griffiths, an Australian-born actress who was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for another sibling drama, the 1998 film Hilary and Jackie, said her expertise in family dysfunction owes some debt to her own turbulent upbringing in Melbourne. But mostly it has been a gift from strong writers. Now she is reuniting with one of them, Jon Robin Baitz, the creator of Brothers & Sisters, to make her Broadway debut in his play Other Desert Cities, which begins preview performances on Wednesday. Once more Ms. Griffiths will be playing a grown-up daughter with barely healed psychic wounds. But the spotlight is far greater this time around. For the first time her character is the central role, and Ms. Griffiths is the key new cast member to an ensemble that received rave reviews Off Broadway last winter.

The character, Brooke, has written a memoir about her family’s troubled past, and she has come home to Palm Springs to seek approval from her parents. Echoes of Brenda Chenowith can be heard, though, as Brooke eventually demands nothing less than expiation from her country club mother Polly (Stockard Channing) for decades of lousy parental care.

“All I see is a bully who has lost touch with gentleness or kindness,” Brooke tells Polly at one point. “There are many other ways of being. And yours, I just fail to understand it. I. Can’t. Bear. You.”

In contrast to her characters Ms. Griffiths, 42, comes across like a task-oriented soccer mom with no time for histrionics. Most mornings she wakes around 6 and prepares her two older children for the day while playing with her 2-year-old. (No can’t-get-out-of-bed Brenda depression for her.) Her husband, the painter Andrew Taylor, is home in Los Angeles finishing work for his first New York exhibition this winter. She often doesn’t have time to deal with things like makeup, she said over breakfast recently on the Upper East Side, after dropping off her 6-year-old daughter, Adelaide, at school nearby.

Her family life, in other words, seems far more prosaic than her fictional broods. (She starred as another troubled daughter in David Auburn’s play Proof for the Melbourne Theater Company in 2002, in between seasons of Six Feet Under.) Asked about her offstage life, she described it as more in sync with Australia than America, where the elusive fantasy of the happy family has preoccupied playwrights from Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller to, more recently, Wendy Wasserstein, Tracy Letts and Mr. Baitz.

“There’s a kind of gorgeous fetishization of the American family that the Australians don’t do,” Ms. Griffiths said. “Family here permeates how holidays are celebrated, how children are displayed in houses, how the mother figure is revered and appreciated — but also has impossibly high expectations that she puts on herself. Australians are more rough and tumble. There’s less focus on creating the happy memories that might not be based in how family members truly feel.”

The neediness and blunt self-expression that often attends her characters, Ms. Griffiths said, are qualities that she remembered stifling for years after her father abandoned the family, leading to her parents’ divorce. “After that I saw myself, through the lens of the 12-old-year narcissist, as a kind of tragedian,” Ms. Griffiths said during the breakfast interview, as she picked with a fingernail at a piece of granola on the table. “I was a suffocated feeler. My mother, in the wake of my father leaving, was so overwhelmed with three children. I couldn’t add to the burden. I was totally a good girl, but inside there was churning — Sylvia Plath churning.

“I remember hearing about the Holocaust in Grade 6, just after my Dad left, and I got into Anne Frank, and it was all mixed up together,” she continued. “My micro-world had blown up, and I became aware of the horrors of the world. I didn’t come out of it for quite a while.”

She went on to spend a year studying politics in college in 1986, but said she “became depressed because I imagined it would be Berkeley in ’72, but instead it was full of prep kids who wanted to make money.” Her subsequent auditions for acting conservatories yielded no acceptance letters, so she pursued a degree in drama at a public university that had relatively open admissions. There she took part in touring shows that led, after graduation, to two years in the theater company Woolly Jumpers, which performed at schools and community centers as well as juvenile detention halls and prisons.

“I learned there how to hold an audience, because otherwise they’d sometimes throw things at you,” she said. “You couldn’t drone on. You had to be dynamic, and emotions had to be genuine. Especially performing for teenagers, if you came out with a falseness or pretentiousness, they’d smell it a mile off.”

Soon after, Ms. Griffiths had her big break when she was cast as the hedonistic friend of the title character in Muriel’s Wedding, a 1994 film that brought critical acclaim and prizes to her and the star, Toni Collette. She kept focusing on films, with Hilary and Jackie out of Britain still her best known, until hearing about a new series called Six Feet Under being developed by Alan Ball, who had written one of her favorite movies, American Beauty (1999).

Of all her roles, Ms. Griffiths said, Brenda Chenowith is most closely aligned with Brooke from Other Desert Cities. Brooke’s relative functionality after a nervous breakdown and years of therapy suggest to Ms. Griffiths what Brenda could have become in a rosier world.

“I remember I once pitched Alan that Brenda become a performance artist, because I wondered when is this girl going to stop spiraling and find her voice and liberate herself from chaotic disorder,” Ms. Griffiths said. “And in Alan’s Southern gothic sensibility the answer was never.”

Brothers & Sisters, by contrast, was an opportunity to play greater stability, even amid family maelstroms.

“Sarah was effectual and rational, which is what I needed,” Ms. Griffiths said, unlike Brenda, who turned into a sex addict. “I’d found the sexual acting out of Six Feet Under exhausting, and physically kind of nauseous. I had a scene once with Justin Theroux” — who played one of Brenda’s lovers — “and I’d had a baby six weeks before. I’m straddling him and my director is going, ‘wilder, wilder,’ and I just burst into tears. My milk was coming in. I hadn’t even had sex with my husband since the baby.”

Mr. Baitz, who wrote Other Desert Cities, in addition to creating Brothers & Sisters, said that Ms. Griffiths grounded Sarah and her other characters in wry, philosophical delivery, even in high-strung emotional moments that lesser actresses might shade into the hysterical.

“Her characters are often rattled, but the only times I’ve seen Rachel herself like that is when she’s asked to act in a way that makes no logical sense,” Mr. Baitz said. Before he left Brothers & Sisters, which ran for five seasons until May, Mr. Baitz recalled visiting the set to talk to Ms. Griffiths about a scene — involving Sarah and her dead father’s mistress — that she found unbelievable. “I said, ‘Rachel, quite frankly I’m as baffled as you are, but the studio people asked for this. If you don’t do it, I’ll look quite stupid, so can you just go out and pretend to do it?’ And she smiled and did it. Any emotional scene on paper, Rachel can make feel believable.”

Joanna Cassidy, who played Brenda’s mother, Margaret, a recurring character, recalled that Ms. Griffiths more often showed a fearlessness that could be intimidating.

“She was so firm in her performance choices that, even in moments where Brenda could’ve been a little conciliatory to her mother, Rachel would never give an inch on her frustration,” Ms. Cassidy said. “You could always see it. She uses her whole body to declare war.”

Particularly her face. Rehearsing a tense scene for Other Desert Cities recently, Ms. Griffiths kept opting for a familiar look — pursing her lips so that her entire face lost softness and her upper lip and chin jutted out in a way that radiated hurt and judgment. As she did in many scenes of the play, she was setting the emotional pace, and her colleagues still seemed to be getting a handle on her acting choices. Ms. Channing and the production’s director, Joe Mantello, declined to be interviewed about Ms. Griffiths, noting they had not known her for long. (She is assuming the role from Elizabeth Marvel, who left for film commitments.)

As Ms. Griffiths prowled around the stage of the rehearsal room, Mr. Mantello would step over with a smile and whisper a suggestion here, a question there. The emotional intensity of the scene grew with each run-through, as Brooke challenged her brother (Thomas Sadoski) to empathize with her.

“You don’t understand this depression thing,” Ms. Griffiths said at one point as Brooke, then pausing with her lips pressed. “Because you don’t have it.”